Food That Tells A Story: Queen Sheba Injera Catering

Through all of the varied rhythms of her life, Yodit Tefara’s love for cooking has remained a familiar constant. Growing up in Ethiopia, Yodit learned the secrets of traditional cuisine alongside her mother. As a young woman in a Kenyan refugee camp, cooking became her way to bring comfort and friendship to others fleeing conflict and persecution. 

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Yodit Tefara (image: Olivia Hasler, Lousy! Creative)

Now - luckily for Hobartians and visitors - Yodit serves up those same extraordinary flavours from a humble truck parked in the outskirts of the CBD. Queen Sheba Injera Catering is Yodit’s ode to her heritage, and the remarkable journey that led her to a life at the bottom of the world.  

When Yodit landed in Tasmania with her young son after five years in a refugee camp awaiting asylum, the culture shock was visceral. Cooking Ethiopian food was a way to connect back to her motherland, and a way to share her story with a new community. In 2020, Yodit made a food truck her kitchen, later finding a permanent home on Lefroy Street in North Hobart. Queen Sheba was born.  

Queen Sheba Injera Catering (image: Olivia Hasler, Lousy! Creative)

True to the Ethiopian way of eating, injera features in generous quantities on Queen Sheba’s menu. The product of a two-day fermenting and gelatinisation process, this unique flatbread has a spongy texture, slightly sour flavour and a porous surface that catches the rich juices of its edible companions. Traditionally made with teff flour milled from the Horn of Africa’s native grain, Yodit’s injera uses locally-sourced Australian teff, and forms the vessel for many of her other offerings. 

Choose from chicken, beef, lamb or vegan ‘wot’, a traditional Ethiopian stew of slow-cooked onions and spices, wrapped in an injera blanket and accompanied by spoonfuls of green lentil and yellow split pea curries, baby green beans and scarlet slices of unctuous beetroot. Deeply fragrant with chilli, cardamom, fenugreek, coriander, cloves and cumin, these are dishes with a (pleasant) slap-in-the-face complexity rarely found in other local cuisines. 

Chicken wot with injera (image: Olivia Hasler, Lousy! Creative)

Other highlights include sambusa - fried pastry triangles of spiced vegetables that make for a moreish snack - and eggs scrambled with torn strips of injera, tomato, onions and jalapeno, alongside traditional Ethiopian black coffee that’s made to order in a ceremonial claypot, and spice-spiked hot tea. Most of the menu is gluten-free, and plenty of vegetarian and vegan options will tempt even the strictest of carnivores. 

Plated up with a warmth and welcome that makes dinner feel like family, Queen Sheba is one of Hobart’s most precious treasures. Pull up a chair on the sidewalk or take it away - these are flavours that will quickly earn a permanent spot on your dining rotation. 

27 Lefroy Street, North Hobart

Tuesday-Saturday 11.30am-8pm (summer), 4pm-9pm (winter)

Ph: 0478 033 080

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